


halo

by Authoress



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Body Horror, Experimental Style, Horror, M/M, Monsters, but even i don't fully understand it, i wish i could tell you what to expect, it's a story of a boy and a town of snow and a forest of fear, mindfuckery, monster!oikawa, or is he...?, this wasn't supposed to be an essay on humanity but ykno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-25
Updated: 2016-01-25
Packaged: 2018-05-16 04:24:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5814010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Authoress/pseuds/Authoress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>I fell in love with a monster.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>  <i>I’m sorry.</i></p><p> </p><p>  <i>Let me explain.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	halo

**Author's Note:**

> EDIT: translation of this fic into vietnamese is here: https://www.wattpad.com/story/93923921-halo-iwaoi
> 
> i couldn't make up my mind if this was more of a bokuoi or iwaoi fic.
> 
> if you're choosing to read this, i'm sorry. there's no real explanation for the content of my mind.

_I fell in love with a monster._

_I’m sorry._

_Let me explain._

 

It always snows in my town. Day comes, day goes, but always under the cover of heavy grey blankets and the feathery touch of snow lighting on a cheek. The people of my town are a cheery sort, laughter muffled by weight of cold silence, but they never give up. We work together to fix leaks in the ceiling, to gather firewood from the edge of the forest. We eat together and sing together and drink together, and in the warm bright of the only tavern in town, we can forget the crushing silence and the forest.

I sometimes think their laughter comes out loud and hysterical, desperate and afraid.

The forest.

I don’t like to talk about the forest. No one does. They say that inside the forest, the trees grow so tall that we could build an entire town on their branches. They say that the treetops are so thick they block out the sun and the snow, and that the forest floor is lit by ghost lights that sustain the growth of plants. They say that there’s more green and blue and red and purple than we can ever hope to find in our muted little town. I don’t know who ‘they’ are who say these things, only that everyone knows it. No one goes into the forest.

At night, an intangible wind blows the branches of the trees in and out, in and out, like the deep breaths of a slumbering beast. Sometimes there’s another breath along with the wind, a great, wheezing inhale that sucks all the warmth out of a room and snuffs out candles. My little sister tells me she can hear bones rattling. One night, she climbed out of bed and woke me to hear “it.” The sound was like a snapping and popping of joints in and out of their sockets, the fleshy squelch of meat, and a rustling like fur outside our window. We held our breaths all night, but “it” never came in.

I was a scrappy kid when I was younger. Held together by band-aids and Neosporin, I tripped, stumbled, and fell my way through childhood. By the time I was strong enough to swing an axe, I was probably more a danger to myself than the wood I was supposed to be massacring. That summer, I cut off my thumb.

I howled like no creature has ever howled before, seeing flashes of wolves and teeth and a sun I had only imagined, and then waves of blood lapping at a shore of white sand. I soaked the snow around me like a cherry snowcone, and amidst the blur of snot and tears and panic, I found myself thinking I might very well want to lap all of that snowcone up.

I think I should have known then what I know now.

After my sister brought my grandparents out and they stopped the blood flow, got me properly stitched up and taken care of, my gran said I needed to perform a ritual.

“It’s an offering, child,” my gran said. “You have to make it an offering.”

I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to stand outside all night, shivering in the skins of a bear while keeping the lantern lit. If some primordial, grotesque creature wanted to emerge from the forest and steal away my thumb, it didn’t need the light of a lantern to find it. I could just leave it outside. But then I remembered the crack-snap-slosh of something shifting just outside my window, and I agreed.

It’s sad to say, but I don’t really remember what happened. I didn’t faint. I was wide away the entire time, itchy and cold in the dark. The snow came down especially hard that night, and I had to keep shaking it from my head and shoulders. Nothing came for my thumb. Then, I remember scrubbing my tired eyes, opening them to two great white orbs directly in front of me, bulging like the eyes of our town elders. I think I blinked, because in a moment it was gone, along with my thumb. The snow had stopped falling.

Gran told me it was a wolf or a raccoon, but I know what I saw. Those were human footprints leading back into the forest.

I only have one more story about my past. It is from when I was fourteen or so, and didn’t believe that anything in the world could hurt me. Except, of course, the forest, which is where I found myself standing in front of on the dare of cowards who used their words to trick me into killing myself. The forest is not for little boys with scrapes on their arms. The forest is not for the townspeople. The forest is not for human beings.

I ran headfirst into the forest, leaving at my backs the jeers and taunts of my peers, half-hoping maybe some kind of mystical force would stop me. But there is no such force. I want it to be known that the forest is even more incredible than they had described it. In a town where silence reigned supreme and humans had to fight to be heard, the forest was an alien world. I couldn’t hear my footfalls, nor my panicked breaths, nor even the sound of my heart frantically pumping. The trunks of pines leered at me with their smooth, ancient bark, branches obscuring any vision deeper into the forest. I looked up, down, to either side, but there was nothing. I can’t describe the feeling or what I saw. But believe me when I say I would rather systematically chop off every limb from my body rather than go back inside again.

Which is precisely why I needed to go back in again.

Gran wept for me immediately, hands over her face. My grandfather rocked steadily in his chair, looking outside. My sister was still too young to understand what I was doing, but she offered me a crudely made necklace of owl feathers and mouse bones and a single, glassy black stone with a hole in the middle.

“He can’t see you if you wear this,” she told me. “You’ll know him by the smell of old blood and antlers on his head.”

“Who is he?” I asked her.

“He loves you,” she said, slipping the necklace around my neck. “I saw him outside your window once, when you were sleeping.”

I tried to ask her more, but she just shook her head and pointed at the door. It would be the last time I saw her, so I kissed her on the forehead and told her to take care of our grandparents. No one in my house smiled, but there was something like triumph in my sister’s eyes. I know she sees more than I do, maybe more than anyone in our town.

I don’t usually tell this part when I tell this story, but this is the truth of what happened. I looked back. At that moment, through the open door, I saw my gran’s skin melt off her body and her fingers extend like the bare boughs of trees. In his chair, my grandfather grew thick fur and a crown of twisting horns. His goat eyes met mine, and in that instant, the last fear I felt for the forest disappeared. As I turned my back, it occurred to me that the terrors spoken of in the forest might have migrated to the town and devoured the humans long ago. I now know that it was my gran who I saw that night, who took my finger.

My sister will be okay. She may have known all of this before me.

I walked into the forest.

It was like before. There was no sound, and behind every tree trunk I expected a monster to leap out and tear my body in two. Nothing came. I had to walk for hours with no change in scenery before I really saw anything. I can tell you what I saw, but I doubt you will believe me:

An angel with wings made of pure, shimmering gold, crying without a face. On their hands, eyes of every color blink at me.

A dog, suspended in air and sliced in two, chasing its own body.

A massive stone foot, covered in moss and silver snakes.

Satan. It is something I know, although I could not describe him to you.

I saw myself, dead.

A dancing company of headless dryads.

A fish with the face of a boy I went to school with.

And then I saw my sister, eyes white and wide, skin glowing a lustrous gold. I tried to speak with her, but she just shook her head and pointed. I followed her direction to a yawning hole in a rose bush wall, stretching up as high as the trees. I could not see through the hole, for it was very dark, but it was just big enough to squeeze through on my hands and knees if I took off my pack and pushed it ahead of me with my lantern.

I had no choice, if I’m honest. I could not turn back, and too afraid was I to look behind me anyway, for fear of seeing all the horrors of the forest behind me with dripping maws wide and hungry. So I crawled through the hole. And as I scuttled awkwardly along the ground, I heard my first sound. The music box tinkle was gentle, almost a caress against my ears. I don’t know what I expected to see on the other side, but it wasn’t a clearing of green grass and wildflowers, the light of what could only be the sun peeking impossibly through the branches of the trees.

(Out of everything I saw in that forest, the sunlight was the hardest to believe.)

The atmosphere and appearance of the clearing would have been perfect, if it weren’t for the lingering smell of blood hanging in the air. All at once, I remembered my sister’s warning and cast my eyes around the clearing desperately for something with horns. So panicked was I, that I almost glanced right over him.

So many creatures in the forest could have had antlers, but I knew in my gut upon seeing him, that he was the one my sister meant. The one who loved me.

Much of his build was human, although much larger than I. He was naked except the massive skull of some toothed beast that he wore on his head and under his jaw like a mask, obscuring his face except a beaked nose and a mouth that boasted massive canines protruding up and over his lips. I cannot tell you what other creatures he must have taken pieces of. His ears were keen and large like a wolf’s, but his back and shoulders were covered in feathers. His hands and feet were massive scaled paws with talons for nails, black as ash and rising up his arms and calves, eventually fading into curling tattoos that moved like tentacles or wisps of smoke.

And atop his head, antlers so proud and full that I was amazed they did not force his head to bow. And above even that, a silvery halo floated above his pointed ears. It was then that I knew, truly, that I was in the presence of the king of the forest.

He dropped to all fours in a liquid movement to examine me. As he stalked further into the light, he revealed six black wings along his back and a long, fleshy tail that ended in a plume of fur. He became smaller, too, as if weakened by the light, until he was of a comparable size to me. He circled me, a shark that smelled of blood, and I felt my fear drain from my body. If he had wanted to kill me, he would have done so by now.

“Do you love me?” I asked him. The question was a foolish one—after all, how could I know if he even understood my language? Alas, it was the only piece of information I knew about him. He stopped his circling and rose to two legs to face me. Finally, I saw his face.

He had an almost effeminate beauty, and piercing silver eyes hat glowed like his halo. Trapped between frightening and pointed teeth were lips, so and full. His skin was porcelain. I could not read his expression, nor did he give me an answer.

I love him.

Love is not something you feel burning and desperate in your chest, bleeding out your mouth and eyes. Love is not the time you know someone or the secrets they keep. Love is not a process or a formula or a recipe. Love is understanding.

And I understood him like I had never understood another being before.

My hands rose to the sides of his face, cupping the ancient, smooth bone of his mask. I slipped it off, because I was the only one who could. He had been waiting for me, since the moment of my birth perhaps, because I was the only one who could see him for what he was.

“You’re human,” I said in wonder, thinking back to the monsters in my town. The beasts cloaked in fear and lies, smiles plastered onto their masked faces, concealing the things they were on the inside. He was not one of them. He bared himself to me, spoke through the voice of a child. He embodied honesty.

Ah, but then, what was I?

“Am I a human or a monster?” I wondered aloud. “What kind of creature lies in wait under my skin? I cannot—if I am a monster, you and I cannot—”

He kissed me then. It hurt, both because of the way his teeth cut at me no matter how we twisted and clawed for each other, and because he chose to risk me and my unknown nature. As my blood mingled between our lips and tongues, tainting the taste of his kiss, I was reminded of the snow washed red with my blood, and the urge to lap it all up. I had it all wrong back then. Blood should not be tasted with the cold loneliness of snow, but with the heat of a partner and the wet slide of lust and love between the two of us.

I laid with him on the forest floor, baring my body to him as he had for me. I could not call our love-making gentle, but it was that. Love-making. His eyes never left mine as he took me, even when my hands yanked at his feathers and tugged at his ears and pulled on his horns. He never hurt me except when he kissed me, and I was reminded that I could very well be a monster in human clothing, stealing away the humanity of the monster I loved.

I learned him, every inch of him, in the timeless light of that clearing. I learned the roughness and power of his paws, but how gently he caressed me with them and carried me when I was worn out. I learned the strength of his wings, how one pump of their graceful muscle could set the trees spinning with wind. I learned the softness and shape of his lupine ears. I learned the holy silver bright of his eyes and his circular crown, the lines of his horns, the brush of his skin and the beat of his heart, loud enough to echo throughout the forest.

I could not stay.

The tragedy of Calypso, the curse of paradise is that it is not reality. The forest was not my home, nor was the town. Both of those places hung suspended in a world just north of impossible, just strange enough to be believable. I loved the king of the forest, but we both knew that someone like me could never belong in the forest. I was not human enough to stay, not monstrous enough to return. The only choice was the unknown, as vast and immeasurable as my identity. To stay and to pretend I was as human as my partner would lead to our mutual destruction.

The last time I saw him, he was fading back into the darkness of the forest, growing to his true majesty. His antlers became the branches of the trees, his feet their roots. His wings beat a steady wind that blew throughout the forest, ears alert to the sounds of every inhuman human occupant of his domain. He smiles when he closed his eyes for the last time, snuffing out their silver light. I picked up his skull mask, discarded and unnecessary now that I had removed it for him.

I sobbed every day that I walked from the forest.

When the darkness turned to light and I finally left the confines of the forest, now turned to the rough-bark pines whose limbs could barely stretch to reach their neighbors, I collapsed under sunlight for the first time. People found me not long after, curling around me with their soft, helpful bodies, leading me to shelter and asking me _why are you crying? Why are you crying?_

“The sun,” I told them. “The sun.”

They understood, more or less, before I told them my story. Someone as pale as I was, having stumbled through a forest for days would surely have cried at the welcome sight of sunlight.

**Author's Note:**

> But the sun  
> wasn’t  
> silver.  
> And I would never see him again.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] halo](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10868736) by [Kess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kess/pseuds/Kess)




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